Towards an Object-Oriented Kernel for Geometric Modeling

The storage and management of relationships among elementary geometric objects, other than the topological relationships, is desirable in Geometric Modeling. Among them, the relationships derived from the construction of geometric objects and from their relative positions may have special importance, since they can influence the next work steps.The main goal of this paper is to present a kernel for geometric modeling based on object-oriented programming concepts and able to support, in a unified way, different kinds of geometric objects and relationships between them. Using the object-oriented paradigm it is possible to regard relationships as a class of objects and, therefore, work at the same level with geometric objects and the logical relationships among them. Test and satisfaction functions for the relationships (constraints) are included in a methods library, and are used to implement constraint solvers.